Google's core product has always been its search engine, and its influence is such that it has been termed "the world’s biggest censor".[1] It is the most effective search engine for many purposes, but it has a subtle censorship policy, so Wikispooks editors are not recommended to rely upon it - a variety of different search engines is undoubtedly a more effective way of accessing a range of material.

Origins

Government connections

The Register noted in 2016 that "Aside from the fact it is persistently one of the biggest lobbyists in DC, there has also been: the last-minute change made to net neutrality rules solely because of a letter received from Google; the unusual dropping of anti-trust investigations into the search giant; the curious "non prosecution agreement" it reached with the FBI over drug ads; and the fact that a review of logs showed that Google execs meet with White House officials on average once a week..[3]

Censorship

Google has been censoring content since at least 2010.[5] The extent of its censorship is harder to assess than with other types of website. In 2017 modifications to its algorithms resulted in reduced traffic to "left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, which cut the search traffic of 13 leading news outlets by 55 percent since April". The World Socialist Web Site reported an 85% drop in search referrals over that period.[6]

Ben Gomes, Google's vice president for engineering, announced in April 2017 that Google’s search engine would block access to “offensive” sites, while working to surface more “authoritative content.” A 2017 march to protest Google's decision to reduce traffic to sites critical of the government's official narrative was cancelled after threats of violence.[8]

Aims

"It’s quite obvious [Google] want to be Skynet (of ‘The Terminator’). They have their own military robots, and have stated that they desire to create a profile on every human.”[9]

Search Engine alternatives

So You've Decided To Boycott Google...

Among non-commercially controlled search engines is the seeks-project and its successor searx.

Seeks aims to give the control of the ranking of results to the users.

Seeks is a p2p pattern matching overlay network on top of existing search engines. It provides collaborative filtering regrouping users based on the similarity of their queries and letting them reorganize and evaluate the search results together.

To order results to their personal liking users can run a searx instance and specify their own rules. The installation scripts make this easy. This is an effective way to break out of the search bubble.